Before and After Trayvon Martin: How Power Flattens Humanity

In the early nineteen-forties, my grandfather was one of the first African-American students to attend and graduate from St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minnesota. Years earlier, the McKnights had left Charleston, South Carolina, and settled in Harlem, New York, joining tens of thousands of other African-Americans who migrated to Northern cities, pursuing economic opportunity and turning away from the lynchings and racial violence of the South. Harlem had already become the center of black cultural and intellectual life. On the other hand, the 1940 census estimated that blacks made up just 0.4 per cent of Minnesota’s population. I can’t say what drew this young man from Harlem to Collegeville, but he was, I’m sure, well outside his comfort zone. Segregation stifled opportunity for my grandfather’s generation in ways that are difficult to fathom for me. And yet, the killing of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman’s acquittal have pushed to the front of my mind the story of an encounter my grandfather had during his college years.

Like many other students, my grandfather resorted to hitchhiking to reach the school’s rural campus from the nearest train station. But the journey was more perilous for him than for others; although Minnesota didn’t have any Jim Crow laws on the books, unwritten laws, and a certain mood, held sway. He must have been shaken by what one driver said to his wife, who was riding in the passenger seat, as he pointed a pistol at my grandfather’s head: “I feel like killing a nigger tonight.” Perhaps that night didn’t suit the driver after all—my grandfather’s life was spared. I’m a consequence of that change of heart. I don’t know how many others died on that road.

A few days after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, I was on the phone with my father. Trayvon Martin’s fate, my dad said, could have fallen on “my grandfather, my father, me, you….” His voice trailed off slightly, and I knew that the most frightening declaration was coming next: in less than two decades, it could find my two-month-old nephew. Not every situation ends with a death, and many end without bodily harm, but the absence of empathy toward black men from our political, law-enforcement, and judicial systems is nearly beyond comprehension.

It is, undoubtedly, important to be mindful that black men are not the only people who have endured such atrocities; black women face a unique set of threats to their bodies and dignity. Amy Davidson writes, “There is an echo, in what people say Martin should and shouldn’t have done, of what people say to women when bad things happen to them in dark places.” Moreover, the world’s history is full of barbaric exertions of power. Talking about one should not diminish the urgency of addressing another.

In the year and a half since Martin’s killing, many have commented on the kitchen-table talks about personal safety that are familiar to black families around the nation. But just grasping the necessity of these talks is not sufficient to fully comprehend this country’s naked disregard for the humanity of generation after generation of darker-skinned souls. It isn’t enough to assert that members of this cohort face the prospect of suspicious gazes or unprompted questioning from police officers, or worse; each of us knows or will know this particular sensation in the pit of his stomach, this tightening in his throat, and this burning helplessness. The conclusion of the Zimmerman trial, the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on voting rights and affirmative action, and New York’s stop-and-frisk practices represent exertions of power that turn humans into one-dimensional beings to be feared, not to be trusted as full citizens, best dealt with by the full strength of our law-enforcement agencies.

Earlier in the week, Rich Lowry, at Politico, wrote, “Let’s take a tragedy and make it a racial crime. … Let’s never, ever admit that if Martin hadn’t hit Zimmerman, he would almost certainly be alive today.” How far must a heart travel to reach a place of empathy for Trayvon Martin? The six jurors and, it seems, Rich Lowry have found that path unpassable or, at least, obstructed. Lowry continues,

Let’s ignore that Zimmerman is from a mixed-race household. Let’s forget that he initially didn’t mention Martin’s race on his 911 call and said he “looks black” only when prompted by the operator. Let’s disregard testimony about his good character, lest it get in the way of the national dialogue about how he’s a racist murder [sic] who got away with it.

Let’s say the trial was about race in America or about whether black men can walk home from the store or any other insipid, racially charged nonsense to fill the air or column inches. The national conversation cannot afford to get mired down in legal niceties like what constitutes lawful self-defense, let alone reasonable doubt.

Lowry mocks those who are trying to come to terms with what he rightly calls a “tragedy.” In doing so, he brushes aside the historical relationship that blacks have had with people in America who hold power. “What constitutes lawful self-defense” in Florida and other states with Stand Your Ground laws has been redefined to legalize—and, indeed, encourage—lethal force inspired by fear. Moreover, a Stand Your Ground claimant stands a greater chance of being cleared of a crime if his victim is black. The history of race and criminalization is not a sideshow but, rather, the central issue.

Later, Lowry writes,

Let’s not talk about the 90 percent of black murder victims killed by other blacks. That is not a fit topic for the nation’s wide-ranging national conversation. Why should we get worked up about something that happens on the streets of Chicago literally every night? If you are bothered by routine slaughter, sadly, you just don’t get it. For national conversation purposes, not all murders are equal.

More attention—from the media and from political leaders—should be paid to the communities being torn apart by violence. But let’s not pretend that no one is taking action, or that those communities are idly waiting to be saved from themselves. Individuals and organizations across the country are dedicated to disrupting cycles of violence, against the strong tides of history, poverty, and dysfunction. Using black-on-black violence as a retort to focussing on a single incident of injustice is a bit of rhetorical trickery, one that further entrenches the pathology with which America regards black men: they’re not like us; their violence comes from something in their nature; look at how they are when they’re together.

We levy power when we define others in terms that are not their own, and black people, excluded from obtaining power for much of American history, have been susceptible to debilitation—political, economic, in the realm of law-enforcement—by definitions from the upper classes. And it’s worked, generation after generation.

Before Lowry wrote his column, and before the Zimmerman trial had reached its end, Natalie Hopkinson, a contributing editor at The Root, called for an end to using the term “black-on-black violence” when talking about what’s happening in urban centers. Hopkinson writes that the phrase “smacks a racial label on problems that are socioeconomic and thus the collective, moral responsibility or all Americans.” A black woman herself, Hopkinson goes on to argue that the term—and particularly its use by black leaders—contributes to the notion that “black” stands in for “violent”:

The term ‘black-on-black violence’ is a slander against the majority of law-abiding black Americans, rich and poor, who get painted by this broad and crude brush. I’ve been black all my life, but no, actually, I don’t have to ‘do better.’

The notion that we conflate blackness and criminality when we talk about violence is provocative, and ought to be considered seriously. But Hopkinson’s challenge, I fear, simply drops the weight of vilification on poor people. It doesn’t much matter which we pathologize, blackness or poverty; both work to dehumanize and maintain inequalities. The reality is that black Americans and poor Americans have overlapping interests in all of these discussions. That is precisely why we have to dig into our history to fully understand Zimmerman’s split-second suspicion of Martin, the jury’s inability to empathize with a dead teen-ager, and the culture of gun violence.

Last week, President Barack Obama feinted at this reckoning. It is remarkable to have a President who can understand—has experienced—the pain that my grandfather endured. It is all the more remarkable that he had the courage to talk about it so openly:

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator.

The President’s speech, however, had its own inconsistencies with history, and, more glaringly, with comments that Obama had made earlier in the week. He continued,

Precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it would be productive for the Justice Department, governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.

But state and local governments have been traditionally been untrustworthy in setting and executing fair policies. And the federal government, when its hand is forced, has been the corrector that minority groups turn to. What else is there? Weeks after the Supreme Court unravelled two landmark checks against the states—the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action—President Obama, by way of his power, indicated that he might open the door to greater hardships for minorities.

In an interview, Obama called New York’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, “well-qualified” to run the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly has not only continued to support his department’s stop-and-frisk policy, he has led the police program of surveillance and profiling of Muslims in and around New York. Months ago, following his commencement address at Morehouse College, I defended Obama from criticisms that he showed unique scorn to black audiences, writing, “democracy is not a zero-sum proposition, and perhaps the greatest lesson of President Obama’s tenure is that he needs help from voters to move Congress.” Though the White House has not indicated that it is officially considering Kelly to replace Janet Napolitano, doing so would, frankly, be indefensible. “Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” Obama said, “but if he’s not, I’d want to know about it.” Many New Yorkers would like to see Commissioner Kelly leave, but would surely lament if Washington was his destination.

On that night in the early forties, a driver used his power to threaten the life of my grandfather—a life that America said was dispensable. By discussing complex issues in myopic terms and flattening the people on the other end, we foresake the opportunity to see each other as full humans with shared, tangled histories. And policies that encourage racial profiling amount to more flattening: Stop and frisk the brutes. Simpletons can’t be trusted to vote.

Obama ended his speech on a positive, forward-looking note. He said, “We should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union—not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.” As someone in my grandfather’s generation might say, If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise.